Fujifilm FinePix S1000fd review

Nothing boosts the artistic merit of a camera's output more than a big zoom.

It helps if it's combined with comprehensive manual controls, and if it costs a mere £135, then it's time for impoverished photography enthusiasts to sit up and take notice. Various premium ultra-zoom cameras include an 18x zoom, and this leaves room for the S1000fd to offer a 12x zoom at an entry-level price.

Its other specifcations are equally commendable, with a 10-megapixel sensor, 2.7in 230,000-pixel screen, electronic viewfinder and live histogram display. However, one feature that's conspicuously absent is optical image stabilisation. The bigger the zoom, the harder it is to hold the camera still to avoid blur. When shooting at the full telephoto zoom position, we found it was just about possible to produce sharp photos with a 1/100s shutter. This means the full zoom range is only usable in direct sunlight, with a tripod, or by selecting noise-inducing high ISO speeds.

The S1000fd's controls are well laid out, with dedicated buttons for face detection and drive mode and to switch the navigation pad to shutter speed and aperture duties. The mode dial includes automatic and manual exposure options plus a handy Natural Light mode that uses ISO speeds up to 1600 for low-light photography. The lack of manual focus is disappointing, but spot focus goes some way towards compensating. Most so-called spot modes are merely a fixed, centre AF point, but this one can be moved to 49 points around the frame. We also like the fact that the pop-up flash has to be raised manually, eliminating the risk of it firing when it's not wanted.

The three-second start-up time isn't bad for a big-zoom camera, but three seconds between subsequent shots is too slow to fire off a handful of shots of the same scene. The 1.2fps continuous mode is better, but is available only when using SD or SDHC media. Testing with an xD card at the top-quality setting caused continuous shooting to fall to 0.3fps.

Fujifilm cameras have had a rocky ride in terms of image quality recently. Past glories such as the F31, which combined a modest 6-megapixel resolution with a large 1/1.7in sensor to produce incredibly sharp, clean photos, have given way to cameras with higher resolutions that add more noise than detail. As such, we kept our expectations in check for the S1000fd, which uses a 10-megapixel sensor that measures a mere 1/2.3in.

Happily, we were pleasantly surprised by its photos. In sunny conditions, sharply contrasted lines were close to being pixel-sharp, although subtle textures such as skin and fabric were a little lacking in definition. This suggests that the sharpness is down to digital processing as much as the camera's optics and sensor, but the result still looked subjectively pleasing. This sharpness continued into the corners of photos, but there was quite a bit of barrel distortion at wide-angle settings.

Colours were vibrant and, although purists might wish for an option to tone down the saturation, the rich colours tended to flatter most scenes. Automatic exposures were expertly judged, particularly in dim lighting, although close-range flash photos were overexposed.

The biggest surprise was indoor photography, where noise wasn't nearly as bad as we expected from the small, high-resolution sensor. Photos at ISO 400 were perfectly respectable and ISO 800 shots were passable. It appears that Fujifilm has taken a more enlightened approach to noise reduction than in previous cameras, letting more noise through but retaining more fine detail.